A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Chapter 180: The Shadows - Part 5

And then Beam's sword plunged into the back of its neck. Beam landed the blow with confidence, putting all his force behind it – but even that was not enough to instantly kill it.

Its confusion was replaced by anger, as it let its friend fall from its blood hands and towards the floor. It felt for the wound on the back of its neck, saw its hand return bloody, and then it pointed at Beam and began to stride towards him with fury in every step.

Beam readied himself. He bent his knees and spread his weight evenly beneath his feet, doing his very best to hold his ground and to prepare for the attack that was sure to come. He gripped his sword tightly, looking for any sign of weakness that there was in the Konbreaker's defence.

But just before it came into range, that creature collapsed as well, a shocked look on its face, as the strength went from its legs. It was its left leg that buckled first, and it ended up on its side, before its right leg lost its strength with it, followed by its arms.

It died a death of pure confusion, as blood pooled beneath it from the wound in the back of its head.

Beam could only stand there staring, unsure of exactly what had just occurred. He was pretty sure that it fell to the cut on the back of its head, but from the way it had been so confidently walking towards him, he'd been led to believe that such a wound was only shallow.

And now there were two massive creatures in front of him, both of them dead and both of them of unfathomable strength. A strength that Beam knew he currently struggled to match. Well, not just struggled, he knew he certainly couldn't match it, at least when it came down to pure physicality.

But he felt that, in a pure one-on-one scenario, if he were to push himself to his limits, he felt that he might be able to match it there.

Even then, it was dubious and was likely to be a highly fraught competition – a competition that he was lucky to avoid. Somehow, it seemed that complexity proved to be the creature's biggest weakness. That and their size.

With how big they were, and how strong, their intelligence couldn't keep up. To maintain a size like that and fight to their fullest ability, one needed an awareness far beyond what a monster possessed, and in a tight space like the clearing, with so many trees their way and a cliff at their back, their strength and their size had proved to be more of a burden than anything else.

With those two corpses at his feet, and the corpses of all the kills he'd neatly set up all strewn about the clearing, Beam was struck by a sudden wave of exhaustion, as he realized just how lucky he'd been to survive the encounter.

"I'm no longer sure if this is a good idea…" he said to himself.

There was now a solid hole in the side of the cliff from where the Konbreaker had charged in and got its claws stuck. Beam hesitated to call it a cave, for it wasn't very deep. At most, it was only a few metres, but in eyeing that cave, he realized that he needed to make sure the bodies he had were better defended – that was if he planned to keep using them at all.

He'd known them to be potent boosters of strength after seeing the horned goblins use them to become something stronger, but after seeing just how quickly and recklessly the Konbreakers were able to evolve, he was feeling unsure of himself.

He felt like he was using oil in order to contain fire. The slightest mishandling and the whole plan would fall through.

He glanced at the sky. The moon was still low and the stars were bright – the night had only just begun. There was much work to do.

Somehow, Beam realized he'd have to get everything cleaned up again after the Konbreaker's destruction. He couldn't risk any of the monsters finding scraps of meat that he couldn't defend.

Heaving a massive sigh, Beam got to work. Dragging the Konbreaker corpses into that half-cave they'd created, that was the hardest part. Not only did their size make them heavy, but the shell armour that they wore must have weighed something insane too, because Beam quickly found himself straining hard under the effort of moving them.

It wasn't so bad with the first, cleaner corpse. But then there was the second one, whose insides had been spilt everywhere, leaving an awful stench as its partly digested remains stewed in the air.

There wasn't much else he could do other than just grit his teeth and pull, despite the mess. He heaved that second corpse next to the first one and breathed a sigh of relief.
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And yet, already, there were new enemies on the horizon. He could hear the familiar sounds of goblins clicking, and soon enough, just a moment later, he caught sight of their green skin. With the meat scattered everywhere as it was, Beam had no time to waste.

He darted forward and drew his sword. In the moonlight, he caught a glimpse of one of the goblin's horns. Already, it had a lump of meat in its hand and was chewing frantically, its eyes darting this way and that all the while, as it looked for what else it needed to complete the evolution.

Desperately, Beam closed the gap. He'd learned earlier that he was able to deal with evolved horned goblins, or at least their half-evolved version. But now, after his battle with the Konbreaker, he simply didn't have the time to take things leisurely. His monster lure was working far too well, and there was meat strewn everywhere across the clearing.

The more time he spent on these, the more the chances of other monsters arriving rose.

The goblin attempted to skip out of range. There was no weapon in its hand. It had discarded its spear earlier, boosted by the lure of meat. With its attention only half on Beam, as it looked for more food to gorge itself on, it didn't stand a chance as Beam's sword came in swinging from above.